A walk-through of the 100-point SEO audit I run before any new engagement — what it covers, why it matters, and what happens when teams skip it.
Why the audit comes before the plan
Every SEO engagement I take starts with an audit, and every audit follows the same structure. The reason isn’t process for its own sake — it’s that an SEO plan written without an audit is, at best, a generic content calendar; at worst, an expensive accident. The audit produces the constraints inside which a real plan can exist.
What the audit covers
The audit splits into five workstreams:
- Technical (28 points) — crawl behaviour, render, indexation, sitemap accuracy, robots.txt, Core Web Vitals, JavaScript-rendered content, log-file analysis where available.
- On-page (22 points) — titles, meta descriptions, headings, schema, internal links, content depth per page, image alt coverage, canonical hygiene.
- Content (18 points) — topical coverage, gap analysis, keyword cannibalisation, content freshness, internal link maps, content-to-page conversion.
- Links (14 points) — link velocity, anchor distribution, toxic profile, lost links, referring-domain diversity.
- Measurement (18 points) — GA4 setup, Search Console hygiene, conversion events, dashboards, reporting cadence.
What teams lose by skipping it
Plenty. The most expensive cost is usually opportunity cost — months of writing aimed at the wrong keywords, against the wrong intent, on pages with the wrong canonical setup. The free SEO audit checklist is the public version of the audit I run for clients; if you have an internal SEO team, hand it to them.